Lizzie shakes her head no. “Well, maybe it’s a package delivery,” says Janice, although she recalls that FedEx has already come and gone today. For a second she wonders,
Could it be Paul?
But why would he ring the bell? Then she decides it is more likely a neighbor or a friend coming by to see how Janice is holding up. She is thankful that, if that’s the case, they will be walking into an idyllic domestic tableau. No train wreck here. No. Train. Wreck. Heeeeere! But at the door, instead, is Paul’s personal assistant, Evan. Evan is in his early thirties—awfully old to be an assistant, Janice has always thought—and prematurely balding. Unlike older men who use the comb-over or the close crop to disguise their hair loss, youthful Evan has chosen to disguise his receding hairline by wearing a baseball cap with the Coifex logo on it. Janice is annoyed that he doesn’t take the hat off when she opens the door.
“Hi, Janice,” says Evan. “How are you?”
Taken aback, Janice nods, choosing not to be overly friendly with Evan until she knows what, exactly, he is here for. “I’m fine. How may I help you?”
“I’ve come to pick up Mr. Miller’s things,” Evan says, and shoves his hand deep in the pockets of his khakis. He pulls out a folded piece of paper. “He gave me a list.”
Janice is aware of Margaret’s presence behind her, so close that she can feel her hot breath against her neck. She doesn’t turn around. “His work papers, I assume? They’re in his office in the back.”
Evan won’t look at her but instead unfolds the paper and stares at it as if he is reading it for the first time, though he clearly isn’t. “No, Mrs. Miller. Mostly his personal belongings. His clothes.”
“Oh,” says Janice, suddenly dizzy. “Well, come in.” She watches him walk through the door and lets him start up the stairs before she calls up after him.
“Wait,” she says. He pauses mid-step and turns around slowly. “Take off your hat. We don’t allow hats in the house.” Evan nods and removes his hat, folds it in half, and shoves it into his pocket. Janice notices that underneath the hat, Evan’s remaining hair is greasy and creased.
She follows Evan up the stairs and is followed, in turn, by Margaret and Lizzie, trailing a cautious ten feet behind. Evan seems to know his way to the bedroom already—it appears that Paul has drawn him a map on a piece of paper—and immediately walks into Paul’s closet and begins pulling down wool suits, shoes, rugby shirts, chinos, and polo sweaters. He takes the suitcases off the top shelf—he seems to already know that the gray suitcases are Paul’s, whereas the burgundy ones are Janice’s—and begins to throw the clothes into them, willy-nilly.
“Oh, don’t do it like that,” she says, unable to prevent herself from moving forward to help. “Fold them, at least.”
But Evan shakes his head and blocks her way to the suitcases. “Really, this is fine. We’ll just have them pressed.”
She steps back and lets her hands flutter aimlessly by her sides. They itch to do something—to fold a shirt, to tuck a pair of shoes into a shoe bag, to smack Evan over his smug head with a sweater. She senses It throbbing through her veins, keeping her from doing anything stupid or rash, but senses, too, that its copacetic thrall isn’t as strong as it was just a few minutes ago.
Evan picks up a beige summer suit that is lying on the chaise, a casualty of her Hefty-bag incident, covered with scuff marks and smudges. Can Evan tell that she has mistreated Paul’s suit? Is he judging her for that? “That needs to be cleaned,” Janice informs him, trying to snatch the suit from his grasp. “You shouldn’t take it.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Evan answers. He points to the top of the dresser. “That’s his jewelry case, right? He wants his cuff links.”
Margaret and Lizzie are standing in the doorway of the closet. Lizzie’s mouth hangs open, and Margaret’s hands are clenched in front of her, radiating fury. It is their presence more than Evan’s curt efficiency that makes Janice feel like she is about to fall apart, despite It. She moves to the door and waves her daughters out. “Leave,” she says. “Just leave.”
Evan looks up. “If this is awkward, I don’t really need you to be here, either, Janice,” he says. “I’ll be quick. I know where everything is. He told me.”
Janice nods, feeling more helpless, she thinks, than she has ever felt in her life. “I’ll leave you alone,” she says, desperate to get down to her purse. It’s only been an hour since her last dose and James said she should wait at least four, but maybe just a little tiny bit more would help. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Actually, if you don’t mind, he wants his golf clubs? I think he said they’re in the garage?”
But Janice stands there, unable to tear herself away from the spectacle, until a high-pitched shriek splits the air. Janice jumps, her hands flying up in an involuntary spasm of panic, and she realizes that it’s the smoke alarm going off downstairs. She can hear the neighbor’s Labrador retriever barking wildly through the ringing in her eardrums and the bleating of the alarm. Evan freezes, his hands buried in Paul’s sock drawer, and stares at Janice until she turns and bolts from the room.
She races down the stairs, smelling burning sugar. In the kitchen, tendrils of black smoke drift, snakelike, from the oven up to the ceiling. She grabs the nearest dish towel—the oven mitts are not in their usual spot by the stove—yanks open the oven door, and grabs the scorching pie plate. It burns right through the rag, searing the flesh on her hands. She flings the pie dish away instinctively and watches it skitter across the kitchen floor as charred bits of apple splatter across the tile. The glass plate cracks right through the center. She thrusts her hands in the sink and runs cold water over her palms as the smoke alarm continues to go off. Smoke billows from the superheated pie plate, which, Janice realizes, is now burning a mark into her cherry wood floor.
Lizzie and Margaret materialize in the kitchen behind her.
“I can’t believe he sent his
envoy
to do his dirty work,” says Margaret. “How cowardly. You can’t possibly still think he’s coming back, Mom.”
“Are you okay?” asks Lizzie. “Did you burn yourself?”
Janice shakes with fury. “Make the goddamn alarm stop right now!”
Lizzie and Margaret look at each other, waiting for the other person to take action.
“Um, how do you turn it off?” asks Lizzie.
“Oh,
I’ll
do it, I’ll do it, I’m the only person in this entire house who knows how to do anything!” Janice shouts, and she lifts her hands from the running water—contact with the air makes them throb—and grabs a broom from the broom closet and stomps over to the smoke alarm, which hangs over the kitchen door. She takes the broom and tries to push the alarm off its screw, and when that doesn’t work after two tries she gives up and thwacks the alarm, and then thwacks it again and again until the white plastic breaks open and the battery comes spilling out and little bits of plastic get in her hair. The alarm whines to a stop.
“Mother,” begins Margaret, but Janice cuts her off.
“Oh, shut up! Just shut up, Margaret!”
Margaret shuts up. Lizzie stares at them with bulging eyes, looking from Janice to Margaret to Janice again.
Janice takes a deep breath. “I’m going to go upstairs and take a nap,” she says in an even voice. She turns, grabbing the bottle of chardonnay off the counter, and leaves.
She encounters Evan on the stairway, lugging suitcases bulging with Paul’s possessions. “Fuck you,” she says as she passes. He stops in surprise and stands there speechless as she continues past.
She marches up, up the stairs, down the hall and into the bedroom, where the closet door has been neatly shut, leaving no sign of the devastation that has just taken place inside it. She finishes the bottle of wine and climbs beneath the sheets.
but she cannot come even close to sleep, and she curses the chemicals that keep her eyes dry and open. She tosses and turns. Twilight creeps in, what’s left of the day staggers off into the sunset, and she can hear clanking dishes in the kitchen downstairs, the rattle of Margaret’s car in the driveway leaving and then returning. The television comes on in the downstairs den, and canned laughter drifts up the stairs. As the sun eventually sets, a silence slips down over the house like a tea cozy. Janice can hear nothing but her own breath. She lies there in profound discomfort, hating Paul, hating her life, hating every decision she has ever made that has brought her here to this bed at this moment. She thinks of her purse downstairs, the little packet hidden inside, but can’t muster the will to go downstairs and face her daughters again, so she just lets her high fade away with the day. In its place comes a throbbing headache.
At nine, there’s a soft knock on the door. Janice doesn’t lift her head.
“I don’t want dinner,” she says to the closed door. “I’m not hungry.” But Lizzie opens it anyway, peeking cautiously around the jamb. She has a plate in her hand; and on that, a piece of apple pie.
“I thought you’d want some,” says Lizzie.
Janice stares at the pie, not understanding. “That’s not the pie that burnt, is it?”
“No,” says Lizzie, looking down at the plate. “It’s a new one. We made it.”
“You baked a pie?”
“It’s pretty good. Not as good as yours, though.” Lizzie proffers the plate in clenched hands. “Margaret had to get more apples from the store, and I don’t think they were the right kind because they were kind of mushy.”
Janice stares at the pie, which is oozing sugar goo, and feels a deep pure sadness for the first time since Paul has left. She tries to open her mouth to tell Lizzie how thoughtful and sweet she is, to let her know that having Lizzie and Margaret as daughters is the only thing she could get up out of bed for right now, but nothing comes out except a strange hiccup. She can feel her jaw working, like a fish gasping for water. When Janice doesn’t reach forward to take the pie, Lizzie sets it down gently on the nightstand and tiptoes out, closing the door quietly behind her. It isn’t until Lizzie leaves the room that Janice lets the tears come. She takes a bite of the pie as she cries. Too sweet and a bit dry. Fork to mouth, fork to mouth, she eats two bites, and then three, but her stomach protests. She has no appetite. She puts the plate on her nightstand and lets the pie grow cold and congealed at her side.
five
margaret bolts upright in bed and, for a moment, has no idea where she is. The room isn’t familiar. Nothing about it reminds Margaret of the room she grew up in. Although her childhood belongings were transferred when her parents moved to this house, and carefully rearranged by her mother, somehow Janice managed to get it all wrong. A row of Margaret’s least-tattered and, therefore, least-loved dolls rescued from the depths of her old closet have been arranged on the top of the bureau. A few photographs of long-lost high school friends—last seen during Thanksgiving break of her sophomore year of college—are framed on a shelf. An assembly of gold-plated debate team and academic triathlon and chess club trophies have been polished and prominently displayed. It takes a few minutes to quell the disturbing feeling that she has been transported through time back into a scrubbed-clean version of her childhood, sanitized, all angst removed. The dog-eared
Last Tango in Paris
poster and Clinton/Gore ’96 campaign bumper stickers weren’t saved from her former bedroom walls. Apparently, they didn’t go with the new sage color scheme.
Judging by the light coming through the windows, it’s already midday. Margaret rolls out of bed, stumbles over to the armchair, and pulls on her favorite orange terry dress, a dress she has been wearing almost nonstop since her arrival home; the idea of putting together another outfit, of even thinking about making herself presentable for the outside world, is somehow too much to bear. Besides, she sold most of her other clothes back in Los Angeles. After a week of wear, the dress smells pleasantly gamy. Squinting in the bright afternoon sun, Margaret heads downstairs to the kitchen, toward the scent of brewing coffee.
As she reaches the bottom of the stairs, her mother materializes in the front hall with a rag and furniture polish in her hand.
“Good morning!” In her postsleep bloat, Margaret is stunned by how striking her mother is, even when her husband has just left her, even when she is
cleaning.
She is cleaning in a dress, for God’s sake. She is coiffed and polished and well preserved, like those actresses you see extolling the virtues of Ziploc freezer bags and lemon-scented Pledge in television ads, women who may be pushing fifty but who are constantly asked if their daughters are their sisters. Margaret looks down at her own threadbare dress, reflects on her toenails, marred with scarlet flecks from a three-month-old home pedicure, thinks of the kinky gray strands that have begun sprouting along her hairline, and mulls over the utter unfairness of it all.
Margaret has always understood that no matter what she might achieve she still isn’t what Janice wants her to be: a
good
girl, polite and charming and feminine, a respectful daughter and pillar of Santa Rita society. She never has been, and though she wishes this didn’t bother her and she knows that it shouldn’t, she’s infuriated to discover, time and time again, that it
does.
Being near her mother drains her, saps her of any strength, and makes her feel like half a person. It’s as if she has never shaken free of, say, the day of her graduation from grade school when she spilled punch down the front of her white lace dress right before walking down the aisle to collect her “diploma” and saw the look of anguish on her mother’s face. Her mother never said anything, but Margaret could feel the frustration in her mother’s hands as she used scratchy brown paper towels to scrub the red Kool-Aid off the front of Margaret’s dress in the auditorium bathroom. Janice herself would never have tripped, Margaret knew. Margaret may have attended an Ivy League college, received two degrees, and started her own magazine, yet proximity to her mother, even now, makes her feel like she is nine and deserves a spanking.
Her mother is still talking, seemingly unaware that Margaret hasn’t responded. “It’s really such a beautiful day out. I brewed you some coffee. Really, you should quit drinking so much coffee. It will give you an ulcer, you know. There’s cream in the fridge. Are you really wearing that dress again? Didn’t you bring anything else to wear? Maybe you should go down to the shopping center and buy yourself some new clothes. I think they have outdoor concerts at lunchtime during the summer. At the mall, I mean. Why don’t you call Kelly Maxfield? Remember her? I saw her mother at the club last week, she says Kelly always asks about you. You’ve lucked out with the weather—all this sun, yes yes, global warming, I know, but I was just out in the tomato garden, and with this sunshine my heirlooms are growing like mad. So, an upside, right? Oh! Look! I just moved the couch from the wall and there’s your grandmother’s favorite old brooch underneath…I’ve been looking for it since…”